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Yeah, all previous attempts at making such a language lacked two things: 1. They didn't have a big, well-known, company name with good enough reputation to att

Yeah, all previous attempts at making such a language lacked two things: 1. They didn't have a big, well-known, company name with good enough reputation to attract contributors. 2. They didn't have brackets. Success was because traction, traction was because appeal, and appeal was mostly because those two things. Nothing else was new AFAIK.

yosefk 2y ago
No shared mutable state in an imperative language is common, as are memory safe languages with performance close to C's? Didn't see the latter in the language shootout benchmarks, in fact Rust is much closer to C than the next closest thing
steveklabnik 2y ago
I take a slightly different view of this, though I do not deny that those things are important. #1 in particular was important to my early involvement in Rust, though I had also tinkered with several other "C replacement" languages in the past. A lot of them simply assumed that some amount of "overhead," vaguely described, was acceptable to the target audience. Either tracing GC or reference counting. "but we're kinda close to C performance" was a thing that was said, but wasn't really actually true. Or rather, it was true in a different sense: as computers got faster, more application domains could deal with some overhead, and so the true domain of "low level programming languages" shrunk. And so finally, Rust came along, being able to tackle the true "last mile" for memory unsafety. Rust even almost missed the boat on this up until as late as one year before Rust 1.0! We would have gotten closer than most if RFC 230 hadn't landed, but in retrospect this decision was absolutely pivotal for Rust to rise to the degree that it has.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  That wasn't the case of Modula-2, Ada or Object Pascal. Their problems was a mix of not being hieroglyph languages (too much text to type!), being much strongly typed (straitjacket programming with a famous rant post, wrongly), commercial offerings being expensive (more so against free in the box alternative), and not comming with an OS to make their use unavoidable. Note that for all the hype, Zig is basically Modula-2 features with C syntax, to certain extent.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    > not comming with an OS to make their use unavoidable. Early MacOS did use Pascal, though IIRC not Object Pascal.
    - another2another 2y ago
      You can still find documentation for Macos toolkit with Pascal bindings. This is a bit of a nostalgia trip for me as I owned a copy of this book way back in the 90's https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/pdf/MacintoshToolboxEssentials.pdf https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...

yosefk 2y ago

No shared mutable state in an imperative language is common, as are memory safe languages with performance close to C's? Didn't see the latter in the language shootout benchmarks, in fact Rust is much closer to C than the next closest thing

steveklabnik 2y ago

I take a slightly different view of this, though I do not deny that those things are important. #1 in particular was important to my early involvement in Rust, though I had also tinkered with several other "C replacement" languages in the past. A lot of them simply assumed that some amount of "overhead," vaguely described, was acceptable to the target audience. Either tracing GC or reference counting. "but we're kinda close to C performance" was a thing that was said, but wasn't really actually true. Or rather, it was true in a different sense: as computers got faster, more application domains could deal with some overhead, and so the true domain of "low level programming languages" shrunk. And so finally, Rust came along, being able to tackle the true "last mile" for memory unsafety. Rust even almost missed the boat on this up until as late as one year before Rust 1.0! We would have gotten closer than most if RFC 230 hadn't landed, but in retrospect this decision was absolutely pivotal for Rust to rise to the degree that it has.

pjmlp 2y ago
That wasn't the case of Modula-2, Ada or Object Pascal. Their problems was a mix of not being hieroglyph languages (too much text to type!), being much strongly typed (straitjacket programming with a famous rant post, wrongly), commercial offerings being expensive (more so against free in the box alternative), and not comming with an OS to make their use unavoidable. Note that for all the hype, Zig is basically Modula-2 features with C syntax, to certain extent.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  > not comming with an OS to make their use unavoidable. Early MacOS did use Pascal, though IIRC not Object Pascal.
  - another2another 2y ago
    You can still find documentation for Macos toolkit with Pascal bindings. This is a bit of a nostalgia trip for me as I owned a copy of this book way back in the 90's https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/pdf/MacintoshToolboxEssentials.pdf https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...